UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT SOUTHERN DISTRICT OF NEW YORK BRENNAN CENTER FOR JUSTICE and THE PROTECT DEMOCRACY PROJECT, 3 Plaintiffs, NO. 17?cv-6335 (AKH) US. DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE, et al. Defendants. SECOND SUPPLEMENTAL DECLARATION OF TINK COOPER I, Tink Cooper, pursuant to 28 U.S.C. 1746, declare the following to be true and correct: 1. I am the Acting Chief of the Freedom of Information/Privacy Act Branch of the Civil Rights Division or the ??Division?) of the United States Department of Justice in Washington, DC. My duties include supervision of the Branch of CRT, which is responsible for processing all Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), 5 U.S.C. 552, and Privacy Act 5 U.S.C. 552a, records access requests received by the Division. I make the statements herein on the basis of personal knowledge, as well as information acquired by me in the course of performing my of?cial duties. I am responsible for processing the documents responsive to Plaintiffs? requests to CRT that are at issue in this lawsuit. 2. This supplemental declaration addresses the portion of the Court?s April 30, 2019, Order directing searches of the two private email accounts of the two relevant custodians from the Office of the Assistant Attorney General, Mr. John Gore and Ms. Maureen Riordan, relating to Plaintiffs? requests. Search of Mr. Gore?s Personal Email Account 3. In response to the April 30, 2019 order, on August 2, 2019, CRT staff including myself, and Jeff Hylton, Litigation Support specialist, went to the Main Justice building to conduct a search of Mr. Gore?s private Gmail account. Mr. Gore logged into his Gmail account and then relinquished keyboard control to Jeff Hylton under my supervision. 4. Although familiar with Gmail searches, in order to prepare for the search, Mr. Hylton re-read the email searching guide for Gmail and also performed some search tests in a different Gmail account prior to this meeting. 5. Mr. Hylton copied and pasted the following search string into the Gmail search bar and executed the search: inzanywhere (Pence OR Kobach OR Lawson OR Gardner OR Dunlap OR Blackwell OR McCormick OR Dunn OR Rhodes OR Spakovsky OR Adams OR King OR Borunda OR ?Election Integrity? OR PACEI OR ?Presidential Advisory Commission? OR (commission AROUND 5 ?voting system?) OR ((?task force? AROUND 5 vote) AROUND 5 fraud) OR (study AROUND 5 ?voting system?)) 6. Mr. Hylton created a new FOIA folder where the tagged emails were copied. Mr. Gore reviewed those emails collected in the FOIA folder for non?responsive personal emails and removed the OIA tag. Mr. Gore explained that some of the search names were identical to names of his family, friends, and a person on his son?s sports team that he coached. Mr. Gore identi?ed these names as Adams, Dunn, Lawson, Gardner, and his personal attorney. 7. Mr. Hylton copied the tagged potentially responsive emails into a portable hard drive and forwarded these documents to database expert, who, in turn, downloaded these documents into FOIAXpress, database system, for my review according to our of?ce?s standard procedures. I reviewed the potentially responsive emails collected from Mr. Gore?s personal Gmail account, which consisted of 12 news articles, media articles, or excerpts from media articles from the Washington Examiner, The Hill, Daily Signal, USA Today, Fox News, Election Law Center, and Heritage Foundation. The 12 emails total 31 hard copy pages. 9. We then asked Mr. Gore if he had subscribed to any mailing lists, or requested articles from, the various media outlets, groups, or organizations noted above; Mr. Gore answered in the negative. Mr. Gore stated that he did not personally sign up for any mailing lists with these groups, nor request these articles; rather, a personal friend added his Mr. Gore?s) personal email address to the mailing lists of those organizations. Mr. Gore explained he was subscribed to mailing lists for the above-mentioned groups by a third party that he knew in his personal capacity. Search of Ms. Riordan?s Personal Email Account 10. In preparing for the search, eff Hylton read the email searching guide for Comcast?s email platform, which is accessed through x?nitycom. The x?nity site has limited search functionality, with no wild card search terms and no Boolean combinations; however, this site supports quoted exact phrases. Searching is available by folder, in the message body, the subject line, or the to/from ?elds. Mr. Hylton also performed some search tests in a different Comcast account. Since x?nity site did not support adjacent word searching, we submitted each of these word searches separately as an over-inclusive search to narrow down later using a more robust search tool (Relativity). It was necessary to run multiple searches on each term to search them in all folders and each of the data types (body/subject/header). We determined that searching ?All Folders? searched the inbox, send folder, and drafts folders. 11. On August 15, 2019, Jeff Hylton, Litigation Support specialist, and I met with Maureen Riordan, Trial Attorney, currently working on Servicemembers and Veterans? Initiative, and (former) Acting Senior Counsel to the OAAG, to search her private Comcast e-mail account. We accessed her email account and manually reviewed the Archives Folder and the Notes Folder and determined there were no potentially responsive e-mails in those folders. Shortly thereafter, the X?nity.com site for Comcast went down. Web searches indicated it was a nationwide outage for Comcast. After trying several times and waiting over two hours, the site was still down. Ms. Riordan then provided her account and password and gave permission to Jeff Hylton and me to perform the searches of her private email at another time when the Comcast network was back online. 12. The next day, on August 16, 2019, Jeff Hylton and I accessed Maureen Riordan?s private Comcast email account. Under my supervision, Mr. Hylton used the following search terms in the Comcast search bar: Pence; Kobach; Lawson; Gardner; Dunlap; Blackwell; McCormick; Dunn; Rhodes; Spakovsky; Adams; King; Borunda; ?Election lntegrity;? ?Presidential Advisory Commission;? ?voting system;? ?task force;? Commission; vote; fraud; and study. 13. For each keyword noted in paragraph 12 above, we ran 6 searches, one at a time, and exported the results of each search for download. Mr. Hylton created a new FOIA folder where the tagged emails were copied into a hard drive and downloaded into Relativity for additional searches by both of us. 14. On August 16 and August 17, 2019, Mr. Hylton loaded the emails collected from Ms. Riordan?s Comcast account into Relativity using the eDiscovery processing module. ?Near searches? or adjacent searches were then conducted in Relativity to narrow the responsive documents since the Comcast search was over-inclusive. These adjacent word searches included: Commission w/S ?voting system;? ?taskforce? w/S vote w/S fraud; and Study w/S ?voting system.? The terms noted in Paragraph 12 above were searched again: Pence; Kobach; Lawson; Gardner; Dunlap; Blackwell; McCormick; Dunn; Rhodes; Spakovsky; Adams; King; Borunda; Presidential Advisory Commission; and Election Integrity. During my review, I found that Comcast uses ?stemming? in its searches, which results in more hits. For example, in searching for ?King,? there were search hits for ?talmg, loomg, and Finally, I reviewed those emails collected in the OIA folder for non?responsive personal emails, and after a discussion with Ms. Riordan, I removed the FOIA tag. 15. Ms. Riordan con?rmed she subscribed to the mailing lists for one of these groups in her personal capacity and that friends forwarded other news articles or web links to her in her personal capacity. None of these emails were received by her in her of?cial capacity 16. I supervised the search and reviewed all of the e-mails collected from Ms. Riordan?s personal Comcast account. None of these emails were responsive. 17. Per the court order, CRT searched the locations of the two custodians for their private email accounts and identi?ed the small number of potentially responsive e-mails as described above. CRT further determined that these e-mails were personal in nature, and thus not agency records subject to disclosure under FOIA, because they were not written, sent, or received in the course of Mr. Gore?s or Ms. Riordan?s of?cial duties. I declare under penalty of perjury that the foregoing is true and correct. Tink Cooper, Acting Chief Branch Civil Rights Division US. Department of Justice Washington, DC. 20530 Executed on: g-fhw??em 30? 1 Washington, DC.